An Anatomy of Addiction

by Howard Markel (Pantheon; $28.95)

In the late nineteenth century, cocaine, prized as a topical anesthetic and considered a low-risk treatment for morphine addiction and alcoholism, captured the attention of two young physicians, Sigmund Freud and the American William Halsted. Both launched their careers by experimenting with cocaine on patients and, as was common practice then, in the private laboratories of their own bodies. The book is structured as a pair of parallel narratives; this has the unfortunate effect of widening the distance between its two subjects, who lived in vastly different worlds and, by all accounts, never met. Nonetheless, Markel creates rich portraits of men who shared, as he writes of Freud, a “particular constellation of bold risk taking, emotional scar tissue, and psychic turmoil.” Such traits made them susceptible to drug addiction, and their professional achievements despite that condition seem all the more remarkable. ♦